


The First Thankgiving and Other Fairytales

by 2ndA



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-24
Updated: 2014-10-24
Packaged: 2018-02-22 11:58:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2506985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toby botches the bedtime story routine. <br/>(one of my first fics ever, written years ago in a now-defunct LJ)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Thankgiving and Other Fairytales

 

                                 _**Toby:** Guess what? _

_**Andy:** What? _

_**Toby:** Our goal is to proclaim American values._

 

Molly is a pilgrim, Huck is an Indian, and Toby spends the morning muttering under his breath about stereotypes, revisionist history, native genocide.

“American history is more complicated than this,” he grouses. “What else are they trying to pass off as true?—that ridiculous thing about Washington and the cherry tree? Honest Abe?”

“Presidents’ Day isn’t for another two months,” Andy reminds him as they file into the make-shift auditorium. “First we have to get through a whole _season_ of comfort and joy, so I hope you’re not going to carry on like this for the Christmas pageant.”

“Multicultural Winter Holiday pageant,” Toby corrects. “And at least the Bethlehem story isn’t an attempt to white-wash the violent suppression of an entire cultural history into a feel-good sound-bite about brotherhood—oh! wait…yes it is….”

But he reaches over to hold her hand when Huck comes trooping out with the other Indians. And his grip is so tight that Andy really thinks he’s going to cut off her circulation when Molly stumbles over her one line (“ _And we will invite them all to a great feast._ ”) When the skit is over and the first graders come out to take their bow, Toby applauds as loudly as anyone. Actually, he puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles like he’s at Yankee Stadium. Andy can see Huck’s head whip around, searching the audience, ‘cause nobody else’s daddy can whistle like Daddy.

***

At the cookies-and-punch reception afterward, Andy chats with the other mothers, watching the rest of her small family from across the room as though they are strangers. It’s a rare and eerie perspective, an out-of-body experience. Toby is letting Huck eat the candy corn decorations from his cupcake while he assures Molly that her flubbed line was barely noticeable.

“Ad-libbing is an art,” she can hear him say, and he launches into the story about Jed Bartlet’s (mis)speaking at the Trout Fishermans’ Association dinner. How he tailors it for six-year-olds is a mystery, but Molly seems somewhat pacified. Not for the first time, Andy realizes that a lot of Toby’s stories revolve around the Administration. That’s how it’s known in their household: the Administration, no modifier and you can practically hear the capital letter. Other presidents may hold office, but for the Wyatt-Zeigler clan, there will only ever be the once and future Administration. The twins are too young to actually remember Josiah Bartlet as president, but in their bedtime stories he appears as a cross between an eccentric great-uncle and Jack the Giant-Killer.

***

Toby is up for story duty that night, as well, since Andy has to dash out to a holiday dinner/photo-op for the Maryland Democratic Caucus. Fed and bathed, the kids kiss her goodbye. Huck wants to know if he can wear his Indian headdress—complete with construction paper feathers—to bed. Molly wants to know if Daddy will tell them the Thanksgiving poem.

“Poem?” Andy glances at Toby over their heads. Toby knows reams of poetry by heart, Ovid to Ogden Nash, but he can rarely be prevailed upon to recite any of it.

“Uh, Proclamation.” Toby clears his throat. “Last year, I read them Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation.”

“Honest Abe, huh?” Andy teases, and Toby has the grace to look abashed.

Andy comes home to a quiet house, the kids in bed and Toby reading in a pool of lamplight in the living room. He’s somehow managed to talk Huck into sleeping _sans_ war bonnet, because the bedraggled costume is sitting on the coffee table.

“Whatcha reading?” she asks, kicking off her heels and glancing over his shoulder. Toby holds up a volume of her father's old Encyclopedia Brittanica, open to ‘Native Tribes, North American.’

“Huck wanted to know more about Indians.”

“So you just thought you’d take the opportunity to brush up on your skills?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok.”

Toby gestures at the coffee table, “I told him he could wear the thing tomorrow for breakfast, but that he had to take it off before school.”

“Sounds good.” This is like being voted out of office, Andy thinks as he gathers his coat and his keys. A changing of the guard during which we agree to abide by the treaties and alliances of our predecessors. Busy trying to come up with a joke along those lines, she’s not paying attention and Toby’s absent-minded kiss lands on her temple.

“Take care,” he says, and goes out into the November night.

Andy watches until Toby’s car pulls away, then wanders around the house, idly checking locks and turning off lights. He’s washed the dishes, put away the left-overs; without these chores, Andy feels oddly restless, like there’s something she’s forgotten to take care of. She climbs into bed and picks up the novel she’s been reading, on and off, for a ridiculously long time. It’s by an Indian author (East Indian, _India_ Indian, Andy clarifies to herself; she can already hear Toby bemoaning the use of "Indian" to mean "Native American") and it won something—a Booker Prize?—a few years ago.

Since the twins, Andy has resolved to read things other than legal memos and Congressional briefs; they should have well-rounded parents. As part of a self-improvement binge that includes taking calcium and a multivitamin, she’s assigned herself doses of fiction. But life usually intervenes, and tonight is no different: it’s been such a long day that she drops off almost immediately and doesn’t wake up until Molly comes catapulting into her bed.

“Nnnuuuh?” Andy swims up from the depths of sleep to find her daughter, bawling, wriggling through the blankets. “Molly? Molly, hon, what’s the matter? Shhh, shhh…look, sweetie, are you still thinking about the play? You all looked so nice in your costumes, no one even noticed that your line was a little off…”

“Not the play!” Molly’s sobbing so hard she almost chokes. “I thought you were g-guh- _gooone_. I th-thhought you had gone away. And Huck! And Da-ha-haddy.”

“Oh, sweetpea, it was just a dream; a bad dream, that’s all.” Andy wraps her arms around the shuddering child, rubbing her back through her pajamas. “I’m right here, darling. And so is Huck, and Daddy is at his house.”

Molly catches her breath briefly, her face red and smeared with tears. “I still dreamed it; I dreamed you were gone,” she insists stubbornly.

And Andy gives a silent prayer of thanks that her precocious daughter is skating right over awkward questions about housing arrangements. That’s the last thing she needs. She and Toby haven’t really resolved how they’re going to explain the divorce to Huck and Molly—hell, she hadn’t really come up with a good way to explain it to her own parents. Not that Mom and Dad ask about Toby any more, Andy realizes as she smooths Molly’s damp hair; they had never understood the attraction, to say the least. It wasn’t that he was Jewish, she’d give them that much. At least, it wasn’t entirely that he was Jewish. Religion, yes, but on top of everything else: the fact that he came from a big immigrant family, from a city (from New York City), that he’d attended state schools, played chess instead of lacrosse, studied German rather than French, that he knew nothing about small towns or small talk. Her parents remained slightly mystified by her attachment to the brilliant and morose son of an immigrant tailor and his grade-school-educated wife.

Andy suddenly remembers, clear as day, the first time she invited Toby down to her family’s summer house. She’d found him staring out the guest room window (no question of his sharing her room, not under her parents’ roof, engagement or no). His dark, travel-rumpled suit—entirely inappropriate for summer but adhering to some Old World standard of propriety—clashed with the cheerful chintz curtains. The bleak expression on his face made her realized for the first time that the Eastern Shore’s long, flat horizon might look a little desolate compared to the mountain range of New York buildings.

“Your parents do know that sending you to Barnard and Fordham was not the best way to get you to marry a planter’s son, right?” Toby had asked dryly. His voice was sarcastic, but he looked so utterly out of place, incongruous and solitary, that she’d crossed from the doorway to rest her head on his shoulder.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to the beach,” Andy had said almost apologetically. “It’s really very pretty.” She had wanted to offer him something—anything—in exchange for the willingness and graciousness with which he’d taken on her world, one that even she found stifling sometimes. And Toby had accepted the gift; she had felt his smile curling against her hair.

“Anywhere you are is beautiful,” he murmured, looking out over her head, beyond the marshes to the Chesapeake.

***

A whimper from down the hallway brings Andy back to the present. Whenever Molly has nightmares, Huck wakes up howling: time for a pre-emptive strike.

“Let’s go check on Huck, huh, Molls? Then you can tell me all about your dream.” She hoists Molly, damp and clingy as a limpet, onto one hip and walks her through the silent house, breathing endearments. She reaches the children’s room just as Huck wakes fully; before he can work himself up to a full wail, she’s flicked on the Winnie-the-Pooh nightlight and piled herself and a hiccupping Molly into his tiny bed. “Nothing to cry about, Huck. Right, Molly? ‘Cause it was just a bad dream. We would never go anywhere without you.”

Still not entirely awake, Andy remembers reading some parenting guide that said it was better to explore children’s nightmares than to ignore them, so she adds, “In your dream, where did you think we would go?”

“Oklahoma,” Molly answers promptly and Andy nearly bursts out laughing until she realized that her daughter, truculent and tear-stained, is absolutely serious.

“And why would we go to Oklahoma, honey?” Which is obviously the wrong question, because Molly starts crying again.

This time it’s Huck who answers: “She’s afraid about the Trail of Tears.”

“What?!” Andy turns to face him so quickly that the she nearly slides off the child-sized bed.

“She doesn’t wanna go away on the Trail of Tears,” Huck repeats, quite distinctly, sober as a judge. For a minute Andy thinks she’s dreaming herself. This working mother sleep deprivation has finally gotten to her. She stares at her son, marveling at his self-possession (Spiderman pajamas notwithstanding). So like his father’s. And then the pieces slide into place. Oh, yes. His father.

“Did Daddy tell you about the Trail of Tears?” Andy asks, trying to keep her voice gentle. Clearly, though, she gives something away because Huck goes very still. “Did he, Huck? Mommy’s not mad; she just wants to know.” Finally, reluctantly, Huck nods. This is the first deliberate lie that Andy has ever told her children. Because she is mad. She is fucking furious! It is three AM and she is exhausted and she does not need to be up at all hours because Toby Ziegler is putting frightening ideas into the heads of her children. _Children_ , for the love of God! Who shouldn’t lose sleep over travesties that happened nearly 200 years before they were born!

Molly is pressing her damp face into Andy’s neck, her little fingers tangled in Andy’s hair, and Huck’s eyes are looking perilously glassy in the lamplight. Andy sighs: she’s made her peace with the idea of single motherhood. She knows that her children are totally reliant on her for every material and emotional need. Awareness of this awesome responsibility fills every corner of her life, to the point of making her more diligent even about looking both ways before crossing the street. For the first time since those existential teenage years, she’s begun to worry about dying, not for her own sake, but because it would mean leaving the children. She accepts this added anxiety: if it’s an uneven burden, well, that was her own choice. She doesn’t expect her parents, her coworkers, her ex-husband to share it. But nor is she going to clean up after Toby’s mistakes. Empowered or not, she won't mother the whole world.

“Come on, Molly-doll,” Andy coaxes. “We’re going to call Daddy. He’ll tell you there’s nothing to worry about.” _And he’d damn well better be convincing_ , she thinks to herself; if we’re awake at this hour, he should be, too. With a bundle of Molly and blankets in her arms and a sniffling Huck tagging at her heels, Andy heads into the kitchen. She sits Molly in the breakfast nook and dials Toby’s number. He picks up immediately, sounding remarkably awake. Must be all those years of working 24/7 for the President, Andy thinks bitterly.

“Andy?” he’s surprised to hear her voice. And then he's panicked. “What’s wrong? Are the kids ok? Is anything—”

“You couldn’t tell them about Squanto? Or how the Pilgrims invented _popcorn_?” Andy demands in a whisper, trying to convey her fury without upsetting the twins any further. “You had to give them a goddamn history lesson? Complete with starvation and displacement? The Trail of Tears? Good Christ, Toby: they’re six! What were you thinking?! No! No, the kids are not ok! They. Can’t. Sleep. Toby, they are afraid in their own beds because you decided, heaven forbid, that they have some idealized belief about the First fucking Thanksgiving!”

There is stunned silence on the other end of the line before Toby stutters a response: “I, uhm, Andy. I didn’t think—”

“Yeah, Toby. I _know_ you didn’t think!” Andy hisses. “But you should have. I’m putting Molly on now. You explain to her. Fix this,” she growls before handing the phone to Molly. “Hey, liebskind,” Andy hears Toby saying tenderly, before Huck distracts her by climbing onto her lap. Her son had run back to his bed to get Fuzzie, a much-abused stuffed animal, and now he settles into an awkward lump of boy, bear, and blankets.

***

_Liebskind_ is Toby’s rarest endearment; he uses it for both Huck and Molly, but only in their most private moments. It was his own childhood nickname, something Andy hadn’t known until they’d been dating for nearly a year. After eight months of dates—and two furious break-ups and equally impetuous reunions—he had mumbled an invitation to dinner with his parents. Andy had been ensconced in the tiny front room of a bungalow in Brighton Beach, clutching hostess flowers that had seemed pretty in the store, but which looked positively anemic compared to the roses Toby’s mother grew in her postage stamp of a backyard. Although David had been away at school, the rest of Toby’s family had been there: three sisters, their husbands, a rambunctious crowd of dark-eyed grandchildren, a few cousins, an ancient uncle.

“Leibskind,” Toby’s mother had called before he could sit down, “come reach this roasting pan for me!”

“Here,” Toby had taken the bouquet, “I’ll go put these in water. It’ll give me something to do while I’m being berated for not inviting you sooner…”

Toby’s father had chivalrously picked up the conversational thread, asking Andy about her work with the District Attorney’s office, and it wasn’t until the crowded subway ride back into the city that Andy had asked about the word that had popped up so frequently over dinner.

“What does it mean?” she’d asked, charmed by Toby’s boisterous family and newly curious about the childhood he’d talked about so obliquely.

“It’s a…it’s a nickname, a pet name. A family thing. Only my mother really uses it anymore,” Toby had replied, abruptly feeling the need to devote his attention to separating his subway tokens from his pocket change.

“Yes, but what does it mean?” Nobody called Toby by his full name; like many people in politics—like Sam, CJ, Josh (come to think of it, like me, Andy realizes)—he went by the shortened version. Smart public relations move: it creates a false sense of familiarity; constituents feel you’re a friend, feel they really know you, because they use a diminutive. Meaningless, of course, because if everyone uses your nickname, then everyone is kept at an equal distance. To suddenly discover that Toby had a true nickname, one used only by people who had known him since childhood…

“It’s Yiddish.”

“Toby?”

“Hmm?” There hadn’t been any seats available on the subway that day; Toby had been braced against a bulkhead and Andy had been holding onto an overhead strap. She’d let go and grabbed his hand, forcing him to look up from his coin counting, holding his subway tokens for ransom until he answered her.

“Come on: in English. _Liebskind_. What does it mean?” Just then, their car had rounded the sharp turn into Alphabet City and Andy had lost her balance, falling against Toby, scattering his carefully sorted coins.

“ _Lovely child_ ,” he’d explained, his arm tightening around her shoulders to keep her from tumbling into the laps the seated commuters, “ _liebskind_ is Yiddish for lovely child. Which is what my mother called me when I was young.”

Huck burrows further against Andy, waking her out of a semi-dream that involved the New York subway, a rose garden, a hailstorm of bright pennies. Molly has the nightmares, but Huck is, in general, the more timid. He follows where his sister leads, hesitant to venture too far or too fast on his own. Toby dismissed Andy’s worries: “He just has to grow into himself.” Andy knows her own father would have been uncomfortable with a son as quiet and meek as Huck; she’s pretty sure Toby’s father would have felt the same. Really, she doesn’t know where Toby gets the confidence to let Huck be his own person, but she’s glad it’s there. Molly has nearly nodded off, curled in the corner of the breakfast nook, still listening to whatever Toby was telling her. Andy feels her heart stretch— _kerthump_ —when she notices that her daughter needs both small hands to manage the adult-sized telephone receiver.

Careful not to wake Huck, Andy reaches over and gently removes the receiver from Molly’s damp little hands before she drops it completely. “Toby?” she whispers, “It’s me.”

“Hey,” he whispers back, even though he doesn’t really need to whisper.“I did tell them about Squanto. And then they asked me what happened next.”

“And you told them.” Andy concludes flatly.

“And I told them.”

“So,” Andy starts, conversationally, “what, exactly, made you think that would ever conceivably remotely resemble being a good idea?”

“It’s their history, too,” Toby protested. “And it’s not all Disney and fairytales. Not that fairytales are all that Disney, come to think of it. Have you ever read the original ‘Little Mermaid?’ Or the ‘Little Match Girl?’ Pretty much anything by Hans Christian Anderson with little in the title is going to have a pretty R-rated ending. In the original ‘Snow White,’ the wicked stepmother is forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and dance until she drops dead…”

“Oh, please, spare me your thoughts on the appropriate punishment for _bad mothers_ , Toby!” Andy hisses. The silence that follows is so long and complete that Andy thinks they’ve been disconnected until she finally hears Toby take a deep breath.

“They asked.” Toby says, finally, “and I wanted to give them an answer. I…it’s always better to know.” She should have known it would come down to that, eventually. If Toby has anything like a philosophy in life, that’s an essential plank: Democracy is as good as we make it, God is a Yankees fan, it’s always better to know than not to know. When they were first married and trying so desperately to have children that she was afraid to even look at the pregnancy test, he would sit on the edge of the tub in their tiny New York apartment and hold her hand and assure her that, whatever the results, knowing couldn’t be worse than not knowing. After the miscarriage—after each miscarriage—when all she wanted to do was lose herself in work, he’d brought her briefcase to the hospital and sat at her bedside, flipping through her medical chart while she read jury notes. “Oh, so you’re a doctor, now?” she remembered sniping at him once. He’d blinked at her tone, then shrugged: “I just want to know.” Like he wanted to know what _Brittanica_ has to say about Indians, wanted to know what happens in the original Grimm’s fairytales. For as long as she’s known him, Toby has hoarded facts like diamonds, ready to polish them and award them to people he loves. Andy supposes that, as a personal creed, it could be worse, but…

“They don’t have to know everything right now, Toby. You really scared her!” she adds, because he sounds so dismayed that she’s started to feel sorry for him.

“Yeah. I…yeah, you’re right, of course….I scared me a little bit, too.” He’s genuinely rattled that he’d misjudged the effect of his words so completely. She knows that he’s so intent on treating Huck and Molly as individual people that he forgets sometimes they’re only six. “Are they asleep?”

Andy sighs. Huck has fallen asleep with his head in her lap and Fuzzy’s button nose leaving an impression on her forearm. Molly is snuffling sleepily on the other side. Andy doesn’t know what Toby said to the little girl, but it seems that this particular nightmare has been conquered. Not that there won’t be others. If the twins are old enough to hear Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation, are they old enough to learn about the Trail of Tears? When will they be at the right age to learn that not all Americans get to share in the feast? “I don’t know when they’ll be old enough,” she says distractedly.

“My God, sometimes I’m pretty sure _I’m_ not old enough,” Toby replies with a dry laugh that sounds as tired and hollow as Andy feels.

“So, what are we going to do?”

“About what?”

“About _the world_ , Toby!”

“Well…” Andy can picture him, searching that encyclopedic brain for the right fact, the correct knowledge. Coming up empty-handed, as he must. “We’ll fix it as best we can, I guess.”

It’s the _I guess_ tacked on at the end that keeps it from being a depressing thought, Andy decides; that’s what makes it seem an achievable goal rather than a slice of heroic rhetoric. She couldn’t explain it if she had to, but she suddenly feels the night’s tension leak out of her. She tries and fails to stifle the enormous yawn that abruptly overtakes her.

Toby hears it on the other end of the phone: “Think about it tomorrow?” he offers.

“Fiddle-de-de,” Andy channels her best Scarlett O’Hara.

“Talk about revisionists…” Toby mumbles, “…whig history…”

Andy smiles despite herself. “We can hold off on bedtime stories about the nastier aspects of chattel slavery for a while yet, right?”

“Oh, absolutely. Until the kids are eight, at least. Maybe nine,” Toby assures her. She can hear him smiling.

“I should really get them to bed,” Andy says finally, a little reluctant to be the first to hang up.

“Right. Ok.”

“So. Good night.”

“Sweet dreams,” Toby says and there’s a click and then the dial-tone. He’d never said he was sorry, Andy realizes as she reviews the conversation in her head. Or that he loved them; isn’t that the usual sign-off: _love you, good night?_ Not that he needed to, really; she knows both of those things are true. And he knows she knew. Fuzzie has fallen out of Huck’s grasp and Molly’s thumb has found her mouth. The clock on the microwave tells Andy it’s 1:34 AM. No rest for the wicked, she thinks: tomorrow is already here.

***

_“Her twins seemed like a pair of small bewildered frogs engrossed in each other’s company, lolloping arm in arm down a highway full of hurtling traffic._

_Entirely oblivious to what trucks can do to frogs.”_

**Author's Note:**

> Epigraph from the WW episode "Night Five." Final quote from Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things (which is the Indian Indian book Andy was reading)


End file.
